Only professional artists and bands having at least one year of activity and a stage experience will be considered.
Only applicants over 18 years old will be considered.
The closing date for applicants is 30 April 2022 (the date of the postmark applies).
Only complete files and sent by the deadline will be considered.
The material sent must be exempted from customs duties mentioning “promotional material with no commercial value”. If not, Visa For Music may refuse them.
Artists / bands will be selected by Visa For Music’s selection committee and jury.
Visa For Music is unable to return materials and documents to applicants.
If the band is selected, Visa For Music will request exclusive performance rights within a month and a 200 km radius in Morocco.
Visa For Music provides the place where the showcases take place as well as the list of the available backline.
The organization provides all the necessary equipment for bands’ performances; any element/material that does not show on the list should be borne by the band.
Bands’ performances cannot exceed 45 minutes and are aimed for music professionals.
Number of Awardees: 30 artists or groups
Value of Scholarship: Fully-funded to Rabat, Morocco. For selected artists, Visa For Music will borne the following expenses for 8 persons at the most:
Hotel expenses in twin rooms for two nights maximum (including breakfast) for international bands and twin rooms for one night maximum (including breakfast) for national bands.
All local transport costs related to the performance
Meals (for 3 days maximum)
Passes giving access to concerts and all activities for the whole duration of the event
Presence in Visa For Music’s official catalogue and official website.
For each selected band, Visa For Music will provide one professional pass to one person representing the band.
Duration of Scholarship: From November 16th to 19th, 2022
How to Apply:
– Fill out the online application form and attach all required documents. – Download, sign and attach the application rules and regulations to the form.
Applications are open to all artists, including those who applied in previous editions and were not selected. For postal sending (optional), the customs duties will have to be paid by the candidates, otherwise, the applications may be refused by the Visa For Music office (promotional mailing without market value): Visa For Music, N’ 3, Imm 2, Rue Soussa, Hassan – Rabat 10 000 Morocco
The deadline for the submission of applications is on the 30th of April 2022 ; For more information, contact: vfmshowcase@gmail.com
About BeyGOOD Global Citizen Fellowship Program: This dynamic Program will take Fellows through a five-phase curriculum, specifically designed to equip them with the skills and tools they need to thrive –– not just during their time with Global Citizen but also in any future professional environment.
Throughout the Program, Fellows will be immersed in the use of digital technology for social change, storytelling tactics that shift attitudes, the importance of building lasting professional relationships, and the role of innovation in a constantly changing world.
Four Fellows (based on merit) will travel to New York City in September 2019 to experience Global Citizen’s annual festival in Central Park. The fellows will spend seven days with different teams and departments, while meeting influential people –– all of which will advance their growing skill sets.
Type: Fellowship
Eligibility: Applicants for the BeyGOOD Global Citizen Fellowship Program must be:
Ages 21-25 (by time of application)
South African, Nigerian and Kenyan residents and citizens only
Applicants without a tertiary qualification preferred
Applicants should be able to prove that they are active Global Citizens, either through the work they do in their communities or through Global Citizen’s website and/or app (Google Play Store OR App Store)
Applicants should be available full-time from 19 July 2022-30 June 2023
We encourage those with an annual family household income of under R120 000 / 3055563 Naira / KES 18169368,00, and/or families that are headed by a single parent
South African applicants must house themselves in Johannesburg, and Nigerian applicants in Lagos.
Kenyan applicants can be based anywhere in the country, and will participate virtually.
Those from minority and underrepresented communities are strongly encouraged to apply
Number of Awards: 15 (We will be selecting 5 South African Fellows, 5 Nigerian Fellows, and 5 Kenyan Fellows in 2022).
Value of BeyGOOD Global Citizen Fellowship Program: The Fellowship Program involves educational travel trips which include:
Round trip airfare from Johannesburg to Cape Town.
All trip-related meals.
All trip related lodging and transportation.
In order to be eligible for educational travel:
Applicants should be available to attend 90% of learning sessions in Johannesburg.
Applicants should attend all training sessions pre- and post trips.
Duration of Programme: 1 year
How to apply:
Submit a 2-3 minute video, or 500-700 word essay answering the following questions:
What qualities do you identify with as an active citizen of the world?
If selected, what lasting change would you like to achieve through the program?
What specific socio-economic issues are you taking action on, and why?
These sanctions are aimed at generating opposition from both Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and everyday Russians. As a scholar who studies regime change, I believe the risk is that they will actually drive the Kremlin’s weak opposition further into obscurity.
A ‘punishment logic’
Economic sanctions follow a “punishment logic”: Those feeling economic pain are expected to rise up against their political leaders and demand a change in policies.
In authoritarian regimes like Putin’s, where average citizens are the most likely to suffer, sanctions usually do more to hurt the opposition than help it.
How Putin has quelled dissent
Putin has used a variety of tools to try to quell domestic opposition over the past two decades.
Some of these were subtle, such as tweaking the electoral systemin ways that benefit his party. Others were less so, including instituting constitutional changes that allow him to serve as president for years to come.
Despite a clampdown on activism, Russians have repeatedly proved willing to take to the streets to make their voices heard. Thousands demonstrated in the summer and fall of 2020 to support a governor in the Far East who had beaten Putin’s pick for the position only to be arrested, ostensibly for a murder a decade and a half earlier. Thousands more came out last spring to protest against Navalny’s detention.
Putin has even begun facing challenges from traditionally subservient political parties, such as the Communist Party and the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party.
Flickers of opposition
Importantly, Putin has occasionally shown a willingness to back down and change his policies under pressure. In other words, as much as Putin has limited democracy in Russia, opposition has continued to bubble up.
The result is a president who feels compelled to win over at least a portion of his domestic audience. This was clear in the impassioned address Putin made to the nation setting the stage for war. The fiery hourlong speech falsely accused Ukrainians of genocide against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. “How long can this tragedy continue? How much longer can we put up with this?” Putin asked his nation.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russians have continued to show their willingness to stand up to Putin. Thousands have gathered to protest the war in Ukraine, despite risking large fines and jail time.
Despite these public showings, the liberal opposition to Putin is undoubtedly weak. In part, this is because Putin controls state television, which nearly two-thirds of Russians watch for their daily news. Going into this war, half of Russians blamed the U.S. and NATO for the increase in tensions, with only 4% holding Russia responsible.
Putin has already shown he can use his information machine to convert past Western sanctions into advantage. After the West sanctioned Russia for its 2014 takeover of Crimea, Putin deflected blame for Russians’ economic pain from himself to foreign powers. The result may have fallen short of the classic “rally around the flag” phenomenon, but on balance Putin gained politically from his first grab on Ukraine. More forceful economic sanctions this time around may unleash a broader wave of nationalism.
And former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev reacted to the country’s expulsion from the Council of Europe by suggesting Russia might go back on its human rights promises.
Another casualty of the war
This has already begun.
In the first week of the war, Russian authorities arrested more than 7,000 protesters. They ramped up censorship and closed down a longtime icon of liberal media, the Ekho Moskvy radio station. The editor of Russia’s last independent TV station, TV Dozhd, also announced he was fleeing the country.
Russia already ranked near the bottom – 150 out of 180 – in the latest Reporters Without Borders assessment of media freedom. And a new law, passed on March 4, 2022, punishes the spread of “false information” about Russia’s armed forces with up to 15 years in jail.
Ultimately, the opposition seen on the streets in Russia today and perhaps in the coming weeks may be the greatest show of strength that can be expected in the near future.
Even in the best of circumstances, economic sanctions can take years to have their desired effect. For Ukrainians, fighting a brutal and one-sided war, the sanctions are unlikely to help beyond bolstering morale.
The danger is that these sanctions may also make average Russians another casualty in Putin’s war.
The still-continuing British Post Office scandal involved the wrongful prosecution of 732 sub-postmasters (SPMs) for theft, false accounting and/or fraud.
The scandal is the most extensive miscarriage of justice in British legal history.
The criminal prosecutions, civil actions and extortions, resulted in criminal convictions, jail sentences, false confessions, defamation, severe loss of income, indebtedness and insolvency, marriage break-up, and suicide. Several died before they could be cleared in subsequent legal proceedings.
The source of the scandal was the 1999 introduction of a new Post Office computer accounting system, installed by the multinational software giant Fujitsu at a cost of £1bn/$1.34bn, which erroneously detected the existence of financial inconsistencies at numerous post office branches. It should be pointed out that the British Post Office also functions as a bank.
As a result of calculations delivered by the flawed system, prosecutions were initiated and SPMs were sent to jail. Ten years later, a group of SPMs and ex-SPMs created the group Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance (JFSA) and began receiving public support and press interest.
The Post Office took fright, and decided to invite the accountancy firm Second Sight to investigate the discrepancies behind the problem. Second Sight provided a preliminary report to the Post Office, which accepted that the computerized accounting system should be examined.
When the inspection concluded, the Post Office said the issues with the system had been fixed and that it was now properly operational.
The Post Office set up a grievance review structure and a mediation scheme for SPMs who claimed to have covered the alleged losses generated by the system out of their own pockets.
However the scheme was closed to new applicants in less than a year after 150 SPMs registered their claims. The JFSA accused the Post Office of not giving SPMs sufficient time to file their claims with the scheme.
Second Sight’s completed report, submitted in 2014, said the Horizon Computer System installed by Fujitsu was simply unable to function adequately, and irremediably so. The Post Office replied that “there is absolutely no evidence of any systemic issues with the computer system”.
In 2015 the Post Office ended the Initial Complaint Review and Mediation Scheme, and published its own report absolving it of any misconduct.
Some convicted SPMs decided to sue the Post Office. As a result 555 convictions were overturned, since they were said to have been obtained by illegal means.
The judge in this case also approved a £57.8m settlement between the Post Office and the claimants. He also said he would refer the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions because of the evidence given by employees of Fujitsu in previous court cases.
He said: “Based on the knowledge that I have gained, I have very grave concerns regarding veracity of evidence given by Fujitsu employees to other courts in previous proceedings about the known existence of bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon system”.
These perjury charges against the Fujitsu employees are still being investigated.
By this year, 736 prosecutions had been acknowledged, 72 convictions had been overturned, and it was anticipated that more would be reversed. The number of those affected by other types of abuse by the Post Office, offences that merit restitution, breach of contract, intimidation etc., has not been charted or published.
Alarmed at these growing legal outcomes, the Post Office set up a new shortfall scheme that attracted more than 2,400 claims. The scheme excluded the 555 SPMs who had successfully sued the Post Office.
Up to last month there has been no commitment to recompense those SPMs and the 555 SPMs are still excluded.
On 13 February 2022, in a report prior to the start of the hearings chaired by the retired judge mentioned below, the BBC quoted a jailed and subsequently cleared SPM: “I want someone else to be charged and jailed like I was”. Several other wrongly-prosecuted SPMs echoed his words.
The British Government is the Post Office’s sole shareholder. To no one’s surprise the government refused at first to pay any compensation— it and the Post Office insisted the money awarded after the SPMs sued the Post Office represented a complete and final settlement.
Appeals were made in parliament last year, leading to a government capitulation. Victims of the scandal would be compensated by the government itself, since the Post Office itself could not shoulder the financial burden resulting from the numerous compensatory awards.
The government, by now on the back foot, set-up an independent inquiry 2 years ago, led by a retired judge. Britain has a long history of such inquiries led by retired judges, and these quintessential establishment figures do the expected job by delivering the expected whitewash.
There were 2 initial hearings before the judge’s inquiry was upgraded to a public inquiry in June last year.
In November 2021 it held a preliminary “List of Issues Hearing”, and, in February this year began holding “Human Impact Hearings”, investigating whether the Post Office and Fujitsu were aware of defects in the IT system, which ensued in criminal convictions and civil proceedings against SPMs that were quashed afterwards.
The public inquiry is expected to last most of this year.
Extreme religious or anti-religious engagement of the ruling political forces in modern times would have serious negative consequences for the society as whole and the state apparatus. The Russian experience shows this very clearly. The communist phase of Russia was completely anti-religion. Now Putin’s Russia is deeply associated with the Orthodox Church that suffered a lot during the communist regime.
Vladimir Putin’s relationship to the Russian Orthodox church and the present global crisis bear testimony to this. From the early 20th century onwards the Russian society and state have gone through very extreme positions on the question of religion.
After the Bolshevik revolution in Russia the anti-religion campaign was so rigorous that church symbols and church buildings were pulled down. The communists thought that all people must practice atheism, though at the ground level the people were still religious. Now Putin pushed the people to believe and practice religion as a matter of state policy. The Russian Orthodox Christian church, headed by a classical kind of patriarch, which is different from Roman Catholicism, is not only fully supporting the authoritarian regime of Putin but fully supporting and mobilizing forces to fight the Ukraine war. Putin has become a regular visitor to the church, and has become a part of orthodox activities. He has been financing construction of new churches and organizing orthodox congregations.
The Church’s interpretation of Russian history and nationhood is exactly on the lines any other theocratic religion would interpret. When religion becomes the key source of defining a nation, fundamentalism creeps into every aspect of the society and the state. The Russian orthodox patriarchs believe that Ukraine is part of Russia, because the Orthodox church was first born in the present Ukraine region in the 10th century. St Andrews was said to have established the first church at Kievan Rus around, perhaps, the present capital of Ukraine. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus were said to be the Orthodox Akhand Russia. This is like what many RSS leaders earlier were talking about Akhanda Bharat that consisted of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Putin bought this theory from the Orthodox patriarchs who seem to think that the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union should not be accepted and at least these classical Orthodox church centred Russia should be re-united whatever could be the cost. Though there are dissenters within the orthodox church, who oppose the war but most orthodox church leaders are with Putin. The whole world is talking about Putin but the problem is not just one Putin. The religious nationhood of whole orthodox patriarchs is the problem.
Once he used the starving Orthodox Church for his consolidation, he could easily undercut the democratic process and he slowly emerged as a new model dictator. The Russian election system is not at all democratic. It is totally stage managed.
There are some fundamental issues on which the Orthodox Russian Church differs with the Roman Catholic Church and much more with the Protestant Church of the West. After Putin became the unchallengeable leader of Russia on some of those issues, with the support of the Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholics within Russia were persecuted and attacked. Since the Roman Church is taking a liberal view of abortions and homosexual marriages, liberal dress codes and so on the Orthodox Church thinks that these are all spiritual immoralities that crept into Church in the post-modern phase of the Western world. All such things should be opposed.
The Orthodox Russians see the Western liberals as the enemies. Though one cannot say that Russians as people are opposed to democracy. The very idea of proletariat dictatorship during communist phase has a negative impact on their psyche. Their experience during the communist regime, particularly the religious orthodox people feel more assured in an orthodox dictatorial political regime. Though Russia cannot be called a theocratic state yet, Putin kind of ambitious rulers easily can turn such a convenient orthodox environment into a theocratic dictatorship. If he wins the Ukraine war the chances of Russia becoming a more dangerous theocratic regime with so much nuclear power at its command poses a major threat to the world’s democratic order.
The Orthodox Church is not only opposed to communism and socialism in any form but they also oppose liberal democracy which would bring in anti-Orthodox values into Russian society. Such religious nationalist schools think that conservative authoritarianism of the Putin type is very useful. They see the Ukrainian democracy in the neighborhood is going to have a corrupting impact on their conservative, nominal election based dictatorship. It is this politico-spiritual social base that made Putin what he is now.
The problem is not just Putin but it is the Orthodox Christian nationalism that is posing a threat to the Western liberal democracy and globalized capitalism. Russians also do not want a China type of market communism. Since the communist regimes crush the spiritual autonomy of people and the state must direct every aspect of life the Russian conservatives want authoritarianism which combines the state and religion into one whole. This post socialist Russian hunger for a religious state where there should not be any space for separation of the state and religion is fully backing Putin.
Most Muslim nations also operate in this kind of spiritual authoritarian states. They do not want to engage with secularism discourse at all. The Afghan Talibanism is only an extreme form of it.
Religion and state mixed authoritarianism look for wars with neighbours who want to practice different socio- political systems. The Russian-Ukrainian war is similar one. Once religious fundamentalism controls the ruling oligarchs’ mind the destruction of war does not appear to be a problem.
Once the socialist systems collapsed, the world has come to pre-socialist conflict stage again. In Russia spiritual nationalism, not democratic welfare nationalism, decides the nations’ actions. Though Russia is being described as a Rogue State by the West it does not seem to bother about that label. The mass psych could be more easily maneuvered with religious fundamentalism. Russia seems to show that direction within the Christian world. Since Ukraine is also a nation of similar Orthodox Christianity which accepted the democratic model with a weak separation of the state and church, we will have to wait and see what happens in this war.
The world is now encountering many forms of spiritual fundamentalisms like Afghan Talibanism, Russian Orthodoxism. In India though Hindutva forces repeatedly say we believe in democracy and as of now operating within the framework of the Indian constitution, we are not sure which direction religious fundamentalism drives those forces. If religion is thoroughly mixed with the state operation and once a ruler is convinced that he should become life time ruler and the religious forces militantly control the civil society and the election system could be manipulated or abandoned any system is likely to get into dictatorship. Every nation now needs to be cautious about deeply mixing religion with the state.
If Russia wins and dismantles the Ukrainian democracy the Christian world will enter into a new phase in their experimentation of nationalism, democracy and secularism.
A key factor that explains Vladimir Putin’s military invasion of Ukraine is traditional Russian imperialism.
Throughout the world’s long and bloody history, other powerful territories (and, later, nations) expanded their lands through imperial conquest, including Rome, China, Spain, France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States.
Russia was no exception. Beginning with the small principality of Moscow in 1300, Russia employed its military might to crush neighboring peoples and gobble up territory across the vast Eurasian continent. Under the czars, it became known as the “prison of nations.” By the early twentieth century, Imperial Russia was the largest country in the world―and, also, one of the most brutal and reactionary.
When the Bolshevik Revolution occurred, part of its impetus was a revolt against the imperialist role of Russia and other great powers of the era. Vladimir Lenin denounced imperialism, loosened the Russian grip on some subject countries, and promised that, within the Soviet Union, the new Soviet republics would have self-determination.
Unfortunately, with the rise of Joseph Stalin, that anti-imperialist impulse was abandoned. When it came to the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which had not fulfilled the grain production quota set by the Kremlin, Stalin, in 1932-33, shipped off 50,000 Ukrainian farm families to Siberia and ordered the seizure of Ukraine’s grain crop. Massive starvation followed in Ukraine, causing an estimated 4 million deaths. Not surprisingly, this treatment did not endear Ukrainians to the Soviet regime.
Although most Russians―and most Communists―were horrified by the rise of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, Stalin signed a pact with Hitler (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) in August 1939. Its secret provisions turned over the independent nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, as well as the eastern half of Poland, to the USSR, which soon occupied them. It also provided a green light for the Soviet invasion of Finland (which led to Soviet seizure of a portion of that country) and Soviet seizure of a portion of Rumania. As the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact also provided Soviet endorsement of Nazi Germany’s imperialist ambitions, Hitler promptly launched World War II.
In June 1941, however, things shifted dramatically, for Hitler, overly ambitious, began a full-scale military invasion of the Soviet Union, thereby double-crossing his ally. In the ensuing bloody conflict, the Russians fought fiercely against Germany for their very survival. They were aided by Britain and the United States, both of which also took on the powerful Japanese armed forces in the Pacific.
After World War II, although Ribbentrop was tried at Nuremberg and executed, Molotov and Stalin were not, for, of course, they were on the winning side of the war. As part of the spoils of victory, the Soviet Union incorporated Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and eastern Poland into its territory.
This proved only the beginning of a new round of Russian imperialism. In the aftermath of the war, the Soviet Union took control of most nations in Eastern Europe and retained them as vassals and unwilling partners in the Warsaw Pact. They included Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Bulgaria, and East Germany. The Soviet Union retained its grip on them through Communist Party dictatorships that it imposed, occupations by Soviet troops, and military assaults, most notably bloody invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), where Communist regimes proved too independent for the tastes of the Kremlin. In Hungary, Soviet military repression produced 20,000 Hungarian casualties (including 2,500 deaths) and 200,000 refugees.
When the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev finally stopped enforcing Soviet imperial rule in Eastern Europe, revolutions in these countries swept aside the tired pro-Soviet dictatorships and reasserted their national sovereignty. Not surprisingly, many of these newly-independent countries then began to apply to join NATO―not because they were forced to do so, but because they feared a reassertion of Russian domination.
Events in Ukraine illustrate this desire for freedom from Russian control. Gorbachev allowed a referendum on Ukrainian independence to take place in 1991. In a turnout by 84 percent of registered voters, some 90 percent of them voted for independence from Russia. As part of its independence arrangement, Ukraine―which had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world―handed over all its nuclear weapons to the Russian government. In turn, as part of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Russia formally pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty.
But the Russian government began to backtrack on its agreement with Ukraine. It was happy with the rule of Viktor Yanukovych, a pliable pro-Russian politician. But when the political tide turned against him and he was ousted from office because he blocked Ukraine’s membership in the European Union, Russian leaders were incensed. Ukraine was turning toward the West, and this, they believed, could not be tolerated. In a clear violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty, the Russian government deployed its military power to seize Crimea and take control of Russian-language separatist regions in eastern Ukraine.
Of course, the Russian government sought to justify its actions with flimsy claims, then and subsequently. It said that there was no military intervention by Russia. But clearly there was. It said that there were fascists in Ukraine. True enough; but there were also plenty of fascists in Russia and in many other lands. Ukraine’s government, it said, was under the control of an unrepresentative Nazi cabal. But Zelensky was elected with 73 percent of the vote, remains wildly popular, and is certainly no right-winger or authoritarian. Can we say the same about Vladimir Putin?
When one looks at what Putin has declared in his recent pronouncements, his dominant motive is clear enough. Denying that Ukraine has any right to statehood independent of Russia and glorifying the expansionism of his country’s Czarist and Stalinist past, he is caught up in a reactionary nostalgia for empire. Or, to put it simply, he longs to Make Russia Great Again.
To safeguard the interests of smaller nations, as well as international peace, Putin―like other arrogant rulers of powerful countries―should be encouraged to discard outdated imperial fantasies and accept the necessity of a world governed by international law.
Food distribution to homeless population in Curitiba, in southern state of Paraná. (Credit: Valmir Fernandes - Coletivo Marmitas da Terra)
Almost two years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, its social, economic and health effects on the working class and poor are increasingly laid bare by the country’s social and economic statistics. Numerous studies and reports published in recent months have revealed a disproportionate effect of the greatest health crisis in a century on the working population, which has experienced higher mortality, impoverishment and starvation, even as the number of billionaires in Brazil has increased.
Brazil has suffered the second highest death toll from the pandemic, with 652,000 deaths, and the third largest number of cases, over 29 million. There is a consensus among medical experts that both counts are underestimates, and there is no accounting of the millions who have “survived” only to suffer from crippling sequelae.
Such a situation is the direct product of a deliberate policy of Brazil’s ruling elite to keep workplaces and schools open amid the raging pandemic, not only to avoid damaging corporate profits, but also to increase them. While the herd immunity policy has found in Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro its most open representative, it has been embraced by all ruling parties, including the alleged opposition represented by the Workers Party (PT), which has joined in abandoning the most basic mitigation measures to declare the pandemic over.
Last Friday, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) released the latest economic data for last year. Despite Brazil’s GDP growing by 4.6 percent in 2021, after a 3.9 percent drop the previous year, the real average income of Brazilian workers decreased by 7 percent compared to 2020, going from 550 to 511 dollars. This is the lowest level since 2012.
However, the income reduction was not the same for the entire Brazilian population. A September 2021 study by the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), “Inequality and Labor Impacts in the Pandemic,” showed that for the poorest 50 percent, the reduction was 21.5 percent compared to 2019, more than double the average reduction for the entire population of 9.4 percent.
Comparative data on the income of the poorest and richest Brazilians released last December by the World Inequality Lab painted an even more disturbing picture. It found that the poorest 50 percent in Brazil received only 10 percent of the national income and owned only 0.4 percent of the country’s wealth in 2021. The richest 10 percent, on the other hand, earned 59 percent of the national income, almost 30 times more than the poorest 10 percent.
According to the FGV study, more than half of the decrease in the income of the poorest was due to the rise in unemployment. The year 2021 ended with an average unemployment rate of 13.2 percent, or 12 million Brazilians. The ruling elites celebrated this statistic as a decrease from the nearly 15 percent unemployment rate at the height of the health crisis, ignoring that such a “recovery” came at the expense of the numbers of those formally employed and of the wages for those hired. In any case, it was the second highest level of unemployment recorded since 2012, and the highest among the G20 countries.
Brazilian inflation is also the third highest in that group, trailing only Turkey and Argentina. The 10.06 percent inflation in 2021, the highest since 2015, was driven by a huge increase in fuel prices, with gasoline having increased 47.5 percent last year. The price of electricity has risen by 21 percent, cooking gas by 37 percent and food and beverages by 7.9 percent. These price increases directly impacted household consumption and, along with unemployment, brought the level of consumption of Brazilian families back to the level of 2018.
This miserable combination of unemployment and inflation has accelerated the rise of poverty and hunger, which had been on the rise in Brazil since 2015, when the country’s economic crisis worsened. In 2019, 11 percent of the Brazilian population, or 23 million people, were living below the poverty line. Now, amid celebrations of the economic “recovery,” poverty rates are still the highest in nine years, according to the latest data, from July 2021. According to the same survey, 27.7 million people, or 13 percent of Brazilians, were poor.
It is noteworthy that the paltry “emergency relief” paid by the government during 2020, worth only 60 percent of a minimum wage, had briefly reduced the poverty rate to 4.3 percent. Its termination made poverty explode to 16 percent of the population, or 34 million people. In withdrawing the “emergency relief,” the ruling class was able to blackmail workers into returning to work at lower pay and completely exposed to a further catastrophic COVID-19 surge in the second quarter of 2021.
In the first year of the pandemic, in 2020, a study by the Free University of Berlin in partnership with the Federal University of Minas Gerais showed that 59.3 percent of the Brazilian population, or 125.6 million people, suffered from food insecurity, the highest proportion since 2004. It also showed that 63 percent of the Brazilian population changed their food habits due to impoverishment.
This desperate scenario for the Brazilian working class and poor contrasts with the situation of the super-rich. Listing 40 new Brazilian billionaires last year, Forbes cynically wrote that the year 2021 was “as challenging as the first for the ... business environment,” adding, “Financial incentives [i.e., multi-trillion-dollar bailouts] around the world to address the crisis have heated up the capital markets,” which “directly favored the growth of the club of the super-rich.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, the Central Bank of Brazil, following the speculative frenzy in the US and internationally, poured $240 billion into the financial markets, almost 17 percent of the Brazilian GDP. This represents four times more than what was offered to the 67 million Brazilians, 31 percent of the population, who received “emergency relief” from the federal government.
According to Oxfam’s report “Inequality Kills,” published in January of this year, this led to Brazilian billionaires increasing their wealth by 30 percent during the pandemic, while 90 percent of the population became poorer. The World Inequality Lab study also showed that the richest 1 percent in Brazil owned almost half (48.9 percent) of the national wealth in 2021, an increase of 0.5 percentage points since 2019. Indeed, the Gini index during the pandemic has skyrocketed. It rose from 0.6276 in 2019 to 0.6669 in the first half of 2020, falling to 0.6400 by the middle of 2021 amid the so-called “recovery.” Brazil is the sixth most unequal country in the world.
Not only did the pandemic increase social inequality, but the effects of social inequality have also had a direct impact on the pandemic in Brazil, the country with the second highest number of deaths in the world. Numerous studies have shown the association between poverty and COVID-19 mortality, which at the beginning of the pandemic was twice as high among the Brazilian poor as the national average. In São Paulo, the largest city in Latin America alongside Mexico city, and Brazil’s financial center, a recent study showed that ICU lethality in public hospitals was three times higher than in “high cost” hospitals, which are attended by the super-rich and the Brazilian ruling elite.
This unequal death toll is bound up with the efforts of the Brazilian ruling elite to keep as many workplaces open as possible to ensure its profits. The study “The timeline of the federal strategy of spreading COVID-19” was delivered to the Brazilian Senate Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on the COVID-19 pandemic last year.
After investigating the federal government’s response to the pandemic—including more than 3,500 federal government regulations up to April 30, 2021—the study found a “commitment and efficiency in favor of the wide dissemination of the virus in the national territory, avowedly with the aim of resuming economic activity as soon as possible.” It concluded that this policy, “according to the Federal Budget Court, configures the ‘political option of the Government Center to prioritize economic protection’”—by which the court actually refers to corporate profits, and not workers’ living standards.
Among the regulations to “prioritize economic protection” were those that “expanded the list of activities considered essential during a pandemic,” such as construction and several industrial and service sectors. These same economic activities were the ones that boosted Brazil’s GDP growth in 2021, driven by low wages and informal jobs.
The study concluded that the federal government advocated the “thesis of herd immunity by contagion as a form of response to COVID-19, disseminating the belief that ‘natural immunity’ arising from virus infection would protect individuals and lead to pandemic control. ... one cannot be too familiar with the views of William Haseltine, President of ACCESS Health International, for whom ‘herd immunity is another name for mass murder. This is exactly what it is all about.’”
